ouglas--especially
in the turn of events that brought to each a nomination for the
presidency by a great party in 1860--there was no small amount of good
luck and sheer accident. But it is equally true that by prodigious
effort Kentuckian and Vermonter alike hewed out their own ways to
greatness.

It was the glory of the Northwest to offer a competence to the needy,
the baffled, the discouraged, the tormented of the eastern States and of
Europe. The bulk of its fast-growing population consisted, it is true,
of ordinary folk who could have lived on in fair comfort in the older
sections, yet who were ambitious to own more land, to make more money,
and to secure larger advantages for their children. But nowhere else was
the road for talent so wide open, entirely irrespective of inheritance,
possessions, education, environment. Nowhere outside of the
trans-Alleghany country would the rise of a Lincoln have been possible.

Chapter XI. The Upper Mississippi Valley

While the Ohio country--the lower half of the States of Ohio, Indiana,
and Illinois--was throwing off its frontier character, the remoter
Northwest was still a wilderness frequented only by fur-traders
and daring explorers. And that far Northwest by the sources of the
Mississippi had been penetrated by few white men since the seventeenth
century. The earliest white visitors to the upper Mississippi are
not clearly known. They may have been Pierre Radisson and his
brother-in-law, Menard des Grosseilliers, who are alleged to have
covered the long portage from Lake Superior to the Mississippi in
or about 1665; but the matter rests entirely on how one interprets
Radisson's vague account of their western perambulations. At all events,
in 1680--seven years after the descent of the river from the Wisconsin
to the Arkansas by Marquette and Joliet--Louis Hennepin, under
instructions from La Salle, explored the stream from the mouth of the
Illinois to the Falls of St. Anthony, where the city of Minneapolis now
stands, five hundred miles from the true source.

There the matter of exploration rested until the days of Thomas
Jefferson, when the purchase of Louisiana lent fresh interest to
northwestern geography. In 1805 General James Wilkinson, in military
command in the West, dispatched Lieutenant Zebulon M. Pike with a party
of twenty men from St. Louis to explore the headwaters of the great
river, make peace with the Indians, and select sites for fortified
posts. Fr